The Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building, designed by Renzo Piano, opened to the public on 1st May in the historic Meatpacking District of Lower Manhattan. Although much has been made of the new Whitney’s debut in a neighbourhood prominent in current debates over gentrification and affordable housing in New York, its relocation is also ironically a return to the institution’s downtown roots. Established in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the Museum grew out of the Studio Club on West 8th Street. From its roots in a circle of artists including Edward Hopper and John Sloan, the Museum grew steadily throughout the twentieth century, moving uptown in the mid-1950s before occupying a Brutalist concrete structure designed by Marcel Breuer on the Upper East Side in 1966. (The Breuer building has been leased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will begin using it in 2016 as additional exhibition space.)

The exhibition Rogier van der Weyden, shown at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (closed 28th June), celebrated the highly ­specialised conservation treatment in the Prado between 2011 and 2015 of Rogier van der Weyden’s Crucifixion in the Escorial (cat. no.5), probably finished shortly before his death for the Charterhouse of Scheut (near Brussels), and acquired by the Spanish King Philip II in 1555. Lorne Campbell, the leading expert on Van der Weyden, curated the exhibition and edited and wrote most of the excellent catalogue that accompanied the show.1